The The Edinburgh Tourism Innovation Challenge (ETIC) kicked off with an amazing challenge weekend which brought together over 120 attendees. The event was the first of three stages in the Edinburgh Tourism Innovation Challenge, whose aim is to connect Edinburgh’s tourism and tech sectors.

The challenge weekend, run by innovation centre The Data Lab and Product Forge, and sponsored by IntechnologyWifi and Scottish Enterprise, brought together data and tourism enthusiasts to form 16 teams, with an overall aim to solve challenges in Edinburgh’s tourism industry with data-driven solutions.

The teams focussed their energy on creating projects with key objectives such as predicting visitor patterns, modelling movement and flow of people around the city and helping discovery of new or under-utilised tourism spots.

The winning idea was from Team Budi, made up of Jack Horsburgh, Zsolt Husz, Erin Roche and Sean Paterson. Team Budi utilised IntechnologyWifi and Historic Environment Scotland data to create TruScot – a mobile app, designed to incentivise visitors with points and discounts to visit tourist attractions outside the usual tourist hotspots.

Runners up included Team T, who created a platform making visitor data accessible to local businesses to help them make data-driven decisions. Fellow runners up, Team Geyser built an online dashboard that analysed visitor data and presented this in a way that was quickly understandable for local businesses. The A Team used beacon technology to send push notifications to mobile devices to spread visitors out.